Environmental and Climate Literacy and Curriculum
This page gives an overview and summary of environmental and climate literacy and curriculum initiatives in California's TK-12 Public School Districts.
Embedded Files
Overview: This page provides an overview of indicators related to environmental and climate literacy across California's TK–12 school districts. Integrating environmental and climate literacy throughout grade levels and subject areas helps students build the knowledge, skills, and values needed to understand environmental challenges, think critically, develop solutions, and become informed stewards of their communities and the planet.
Explore detailed information about each indicator, including its definition, why it matters, and how it is measured. The page also includes links to in-depth analyses of specific environmental literacy indicators, allowing you to examine statewide adoption patterns, district examples, and related data in greater detail.
Overview and Summary on the Overall Adoption of Curriculum Initiatives
The dashboard below provides a statewide overview of environmental curriculum initiative adoption across California's TK–12 school districts.
The map on the left displays the geographic distribution of adoption. Districts highlighted in color have adopted at least one environmental curriculum initiative. The summary cards in the upper right show the total number and percentage of California school districts that have adopted at least one curriculum initiative.
The bar chart in the lower right breaks down adoption by individual curriculum initiatives. Initiatives with no documented adoption are not displayed. As a result, some indicators included in our tracking system may not appear in the chart because data for those indicators have not yet been collected or because no California school district has publicly available evidence of adopting that initiative. Hover over each bar to view the definition of the corresponding initiative.
Additional Studies and Deepdives
A general landscape the current evidence of Career Technical Education (CTE) pathways that contain green career awareness and/or a focus on sustainability across the state's public high schools.
A site level study of environmental literacy implementation in and out of California's TK-12 classrooms conducted by Lawrence Hall of Science in collaboration with Ten Strands and CAELI.
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
Key Takeaways
A growing number of districts showing evidence of Climate/Environmental Literacy, with the most prevalent indicator being stand alone environmental courses (363 districts participating).
Acknowledgements
Ten Strands would like to thank the following contributors to this project:
Data Analysts Interns: UC Berkeley Data Discovery Intern Teams
Spring 2025: Kathy Yun, Rohan Bhagat, Sameer Rahman, Srisha Raj
Fall 2025: Adrian Mar
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